Megan Fox obviously knows a thing or two about fame and the media spotlight, with her every move and utterance chronicled since her breakout role in Transformers three years ago. And she knows that not everyone can handle it.
“People who make it to this level of fame for whatever reason — whether it’s deserved or not — you have to be a strong person to survive it, because it is very difficult to be under the microscope every moment of every day,” she says.
“Everything that leaves your mouth becomes this sensationalized news story, no matter what your intentions were when you first said it, so it becomes overwhelming.”
What keeps it from overwhelming her, she explains, is the people closest to her. “I’ve maintained the same relationships that I’ve had before this happened to me,” she says.
It’s those relationships — and a surprisingly homebound nature — that keep her from following down the path of someone like Lindsay Lohan.
“I sort of distanced myself from the Hollywood crowd. I don’t really go out and socialize that way. Oddly, you wouldn’t think it, but I’m very domestic. I think that keeps me sane. My personal relationships have kept me grounded.”
After two Transformers films, Fox infamously parted ways with director Michael Bay’s franchise. But that doesn’t mean she’s through with big-budget action movies.
“I like working on action films, and I like working on movies that are comic book-based or that have this sort of thing, because they’re things that I watched or I loved when I was a kid,” she says.
And it’s that affinity that brought her to her latest film, Jonah Hex, based on the comic book about a scarred cowboy bounty hunter (played in the film by Josh Brolin).
The film posed some technical difficulties for Fox, though.
“It was really difficult for me to shoot the old-style gunslinger guns because I have tiny little baby hands,” she says. But one thing she didn’t mind was her costume, featuring an impossibly tight corset — or not so impossibly, to hear Fox tell it.
“I loved the corset,” she insists. “Everyone thought I was in pain or I was hurting, that something was wrong with me because my waist was so small. But I enjoyed it. I wish that they would come back into style.”
Working on a comic book adaptation, Fox knew there would be a risk of upsetting the core Jonah Hex fans. But she refused to worry about it.
“I love them, but it’s impossible to please the hardcore comic book fans, because they’ll never be happy no matter what you do,” she says.
And Fox has a surprising insight into the fans’ mindset: “Because I’m a Lord of the Rings fan, I’ll go on the forums, and they complain that, like, Frodo is eating the lembas bread outside of Mordor instead of the Mines of Moria, and they get really mad,” she says.
“And Peter Jackson and company won, like, 30-something Oscars for that. So you can’t focus completely on pleasing them, because you’ll never win.”
